A father and daughter’s ride from Vermont to Maryland began like a lot of family trips: They packed up some snacks, gassed up the Subaru, threw a couple of cows in the back and headed onto the highway. Except for the cow part, that is. That felt different. The animals needed to be brought to a sanctuary so they could escape slaughter.
Joanna Zelman, the daughter in this heartwarming travel documentary, made a video of the amazing journey. “Cow Trip,” which has an alternate online title of “My Dad Agrees To Drive 600 Miles With A Baby Cow In The Back Seat,” has racked up over 125,000 views in a matter of days on the animal-friendly YouTube channel The Dodo. The 27-minute video is streaming for free at youtube.com.
Zelman is now an independent filmmaker and media consultant based in Washington D.C. and no longer works for The Dodo, but when the cow project was conceived, she was an executive producer there. The Dodo, known for shortform stories, is dedicated to “positive, authentic, entertaining stories about animals,” according to its website. It is one of the foremost animal video sites on the web.
“Cow Trip” is not Zelman’s first video about calves for The Dodo, but it is the longest and the first in which she herself is a central character.
With “Cow Trip” the filmmaker wanted to highlight “the incredible hearts of dairy farmers who want to save these animals.” The animals needed to be brought to a sanctuary so they could escape slaughter. Zelman filmed it on her cellphone, “an old Canon” video camera and “a couple of GoPros.” She had a small budget with which to bring on a “finishing team” to tweak the video.
Besides the cows — named Mickey and Moose — and an unseen driver, Zelman’s companion for the trip is her father, Jared Zelman. In his late 70s, he is a self-described “99% retired” former emergency room doctor at Sharon Hospital who was also the medical director of The Hotchkiss School, hosted the “Health Matters with Dr. Jared Zelman” radio show and podcast and is a longtime member of the Salisbury Volunteer Ambulance Service. Joanna joked that for all his accomplishments and live-saving abilities, Jared Zelman may be most recognized in the Lakeville community for a The Dodo video in which he helps her rescue a skunk.
Cow Trip/Joanna Zelman LLC
Jared Zelman makes a pit stop to feed a cow in his daughter Joanna Zelman’s documentary for The Dodo, “Cow Trip.” (Cow Trip/Joanna Zelman LLC)
She said her father’s immediate response of “Yeah!” when asked if he’ll help transport a cow hundreds of miles at short notice was as genuine and instinctive and it seems on camera. “He is always approaching everything with curiosity and compassion,” she said.
Jared Zelman, introduced in the video as “burger-loving,” cracks jokes during the trek about stopping for burgers and milkshakes. By the end of the video, he is shown stroking a calf and saying “You could make me a vegan, you know.”
Since male cows can’t be milked, male calves are often slaughtered for meat. In “Cow Trip,” a worker at a small farm in Vermont decides to save one of them but needs help to get it to a sanctuary 600 miles and several states away. After the Zelmans were recruited for the drive, they learned that there was a second calf in Vermont that could also be saved. That was fine, but when the Zelmans showed up it was clear that Jared Zelman’s Subaru Outback was too small, so a friend with a bigger vehicle was called. Rather than drivers, the Zelmans became passengers.
“Cow Trip” has a bright, optimistic tone. It also simplifies the cow trip somewhat so that details and subplots don’t get in the way of the main message of animal salvation. The trip can be fraught. A cow gets ill. A cow pees. A cow kicks Jared Zelman, who is surprisingly sanguine about the experience. Even asked about it now years later, he said calmly “I was not severely injured. I don’t think I broke a rib.”
There are some intrinsic Connecticut qualities to the video, though it takes place mostly in other states. When Joanna Zelman first asks her father to join her on the odyssey, he’s on a bike trail ride. She blames the spotty video quality in that snippet on the poor cell phone service in that part of the state.
Cow Trip/Joanna Zelman LLC
A cow is ready for its closeup. Joanna Zelman filming “Cow Trip.” (Cow Trip/Joanna Zelman LLC)
The Zelman children — Joanna and her sister Allison, former chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Labor — grew up with a lot of pets and also a lot of local artistic inspirations. Their mother, Pamela Chassin, was executive director of the Sharon Playhouse in the 2000s. They attended Salisbury Central High School, where Joanna Zelman said “my teachers instilled creativity in me.” They knew dairy farmers in the Lakeville area when growing up, so besides the usual household pets as well as Joanna’s “ant mansion,” they were around cows and chickens and other livestock. Joanna Zelman put her two nephews in “Cow Trip,” meeting the cows in the sanctuary.
“We all had a love of animals as a family,” Jared Zelman said, but his filmmaker daughter “took it to another level. She unites her love of animals with her work and helps others understand.”
Joanna Zelman had been present at the birth of one of the calves they were saving for a different project at The Dodo. “I got emotional watching Mickey get born,” she said. “I saw him learn to stand, learn to nurse.” “Cow Trip” shows Mickey being physically lifted by a farm worker and put in the car. It later shows him fully grown.
Now that “Cow Trip” is completed, Joanna Zelman can continue with other filmmaking projects, include her script for a “climate comedy.” Her interest in environmental issues is as strong as her interest in animals and one of her previous jobs was as an environmental reporter for the Huffington Post website.
Four years later, the cows are still living at Rosie’s Farm Sanctuary in Potomac, Maryland where they were taken by the Zelmans. The sanctuary happens to be just a short drive from where Joanna Zelman lives now, so she is able to visit Mickey and Moose regularly. “For a period of time I was going out there every month or so,” she said. “They are giant now. I brought them some pumpkins after Halloween. It’s so rewarding to see, four years later, these big grass puppies.”
Jared Zelman remembers the “Cow Trip” journey as “a lot of fun.” In Lakeville, he’s back to being recognized for being in an animal video. “Even today, I went to get plants from a local farmer and he was asking me about it.”